These Chains I Wear
by Professor Angst
Summary: Step one, the day reality hit every single one of them like a fucking sledgehammer. Step two, a sequence of seconds frozen in time. Step three, the note he never left.


**These Chains I Wear**

* * *

These days, it seems that he does nothing but scream; not quite crying, not quite breathing, but the voices are always louder and Marco's is the loudest of them all. At least, he thinks it's Marco's voice. That little note of innocence that always seemed to exist inside him (not quite to the end, but close enough - it could be said that the day he lost that innocence was the day that everything beautiful inside him died, so maybe it was to the end after all)...always there. Out in the distance beneath a layer of warped silence. Marco, choking on the graveyard dirt he never really got to taste because he never had a grave, or a funeral, or anything but grief.

Even if he knew how to stop himself falling, he wouldn't. He's not even worth that much anymore. He stopped being worth anything the day he found that first warning sign and chose to ignore it.

That's the truth of insanity.

* * *

Step one, the day reality hit every single one of them like a fucking sledgehammer.

Step two, a sequence of seconds severed by time.

Step three, the note he never left.

* * *

Three.

Marco did not leave a note. But the day before he took the overdose, he left his sketchbook out on his bed, and Jean can't be sure whether it was accidental or a last cry for help. If it was the latter, Jean is to blame for ignoring it. If it was an accident, Jean was the one who let those last pieces of Marco's life slip between his fingers like hourglass sand by closing it and walking away. Either way, he is left as an unwitting instrument in the demise of the boy he still loves. Something he will never forgive himself for, and neither will anyone else.

It was not a suicide note, but it might as well have been with the insight it provided into the psyche of someone so crippled with fear and pain and hate that their only escape route a path straight into the center of a stopped heart.

So much blood and horror contained within those pages. Titans eating shadow-figures smudged into unrecognizable charcoal blurs. A sketch: a pile of pretty white pills stacked on a wooden table top. Razorblades and open wounds. One page was simply coloured black. Several had been torn out, lost forever; it is only in hindsight that he finds himself wishing he could have seen him, only now that hindsight is all he has left of his best friend. The sketchbook is now wrapped carefully in the t-shirt that Marco always slept in and tucked into a pile of Jean's clothes. A secret only deigned worthy of keeping when silence doesn't matter anymore.

This is all that remains. An old t-shirt and a host of paper accusations.

The worst page of all is the one right at the back. Jean has only looked at it once, the first time he opened the sketchbook.

He hasn't been able to look at it again since.

A date, the date of Marco's death. Underneath it, a question mark. And overlayed by a streak of dark red, the exact colour of blood dried on paper.

* * *

Two.

Silence. Evening light. He does not speak and he does not breathe.

Inside his head, Jean pulls Marco close against him, as if the fierceness of his love was enough to chase away these marks of pain.

In reality, though, Jean does nothing but stare.

Marco pulls his jacket on awkwardly, covering the neat red lines laddering his biceps and the slender trickle of dark blood that looks almost false, yet still deadly, in the last traces of sunset light. Then he looks over his shoulder, perhaps sensing the heat of Jean's gaze against his broken skin, and for a moment that feels more like a century their eyes meet. And he knows. He knows that Jean knows. Something flickers in the air, hot and bright as flame, dark as blood and shadow, and

 _-YOU KNEW ALL ALONG AND YOU STILL DIDN'T CARE-_

it's gone. So quickly that Jean can't be sure it was ever really there.

* * *

One.

Midnight this time, with Marco crying quietly and Jean no longer able to pretend.

It's not that he doesn't want to offer comfort. He aches to do so with every part of him left alive. He just doesn't know how. It seems as though they're all dying, one by one, and he can't even work out how to ease his own pain at the loss. It was easier at first. He could just pretend he didn't care, raining scorn upon the others as they broke from caring too much; they all knew what they were signing up for, that they were volunteering to die. Then they lost Eren, which hit a little too close to home.

Suddenly, the facade was splintering. Falling to pieces, just like his heart.

Now Armin too. And again, when he looks back he sees the warning signs there too. Marco's prequel, as Jean now thinks of it, despite the twinge that runs through him when he realizes how coldly he is dismissing the loss of an innocent life. It fades into the background, a discordant harmony of barely felt pain and guilt, worth nothing in comparison to what losing Marco has done to him. Harsh as it may be, the fact remains: he barely knew Armin, and was in love with Marco.

If only Marco didn't _care_ so much about everyone.

About Eren. Eren, who died.

About the little blonde who saw it all.

 _i should have died not him :: worthless :: i would rather this blade be my end_

And, in the end, it was; perhaps not that exact blade, but close enough because Armin slit his wrists one night in a dark corner which wasn't as lonely as he thought.../ohgodwhy/...Marco saw something in his eyes, Marco cared ( _too damn much_ ) enough to follow. Only he arrived moments too late, burning to be a savior and modeled instead as a victim. He froze with shock, finally screaming only when the agony had torn him apart so completely that it was all he could do. The agony of a guilt that Jean now knows just as intimately.

The next day, the soldiers were informed that Cadet Armin Arlert had passed away and that one of their number, who had asked for his name to be withheld, had born witness to it all.

Marco said nothing. He didn't have to. Jean saw it all in those tortured insomniac eyes.

* * *

Eyes now burning in the darkness.

Real. Not real. What does it matter anymore?

"Please," he sobs into his pillow, words as viscous and vile as oil. Jean hears both screams and whispers in the echo, and he is no longer sane enough to distinguish reality from the fucked-up dreamworld grave his mind has dug for him, can't decide what vessel the bitter words have chosen. And he moans, a wailing, animal sound from somewhere deep, deep inside him, one that he's about to liken to a wolf howling to the moon for a fallen mate when he realizes he doesn't even know if it's day or night. He exists solely within a twilight vortex where the lines of dusk and dawn merge, and nothing will ever be okay again

and

 _they start to glow bright red against the murky background darkness, red marker pen and the shadow beneath is stirring into words, a date, a question an accusation a suicide note a lost friend a broken heart a broken record broken broken broken broken until_

 _NO let me die too NO why him not me NO all my fault_

It's not Jean's first taste of insanity, but there are times when he thinks about making it his last.

* * *

After what happened to Armin, they put Marco on anti-depressants to avoid a repeat performance with a new star of the show. Marco pretended to swallow every pill, whilst in a secret corner his stash grew and grew until it collapsed under its own weight, bringing its master down with it, the night he ended not only his own life but Jean's as well.

 _(Jean may be physically alive, but that barely seems relevant anymore.)_

* * *

He cries and then he doesn't.

He sleeps forever and then stays awake for ten consecutive nights.

He stays silent and then screams until his throat is raw.

Lost in his own world, he hears nothing. Then the voices come again.

* * *

He will not be the next to die this way. He will not take his own life. But with every fight he becomes a little more reckless, and cares a little less.

They all do.

Maybe they all want to live.

 _(Or maybe they all want to die.)_

* * *

Now he can't see beyond all those goddamn moments in which he could have made a savior of himself, all those _goddamn moments_ he watched slip between his fingers

SELFISH BASTARD

just to cope with his own pain and now

HIS BLOOD YOUR HANDS ( _broken broken broken broken)_

he's paying the price

I HATE MYSELF FOR WHAT I'VE DONE

of falling

FOR WHAT I'VE BECOME

in

THE PAIN THAT DEATH IS MADE OF

love.

* * *

 **Edited and re-uploaded.**

 **Sorry this ended up so dark. This is what happens when the voices won't shut up and everything hurts.** **Basically, it's a 'what-if' type thing set just after Eren 'died', before he regenerates as the titan-killing titan with that weird roar/laugh/screech thing going on.** **Dedicated to TheSparksofMagic for her general awesomeness and her amazing SNK fic Calling Kirchstein - if you haven't read it you definitely should, right now, because it's funny and heartwarming and better than oreos, and if you didn't guess already, I'm basically in love with it. Call it the antidote to my angst.**


End file.
